Sensor Tower: YouTube is the top grossing US iOS app for the first time due to Red subscriptions, which have earned $12M+ worldwide so far in March, up 150% YoY
YouTube just became the Top Grossing iPhone app in the U.S. for the first time on Tuesday, after flirting with the top spot …
Context & Ripple Effects
YouTube's climb to the top of the US iPhone grossing chart is a subscription story, not an ads story: Sensor Tower attributes the milestone entirely to YouTube Red, whose $12M+ worldwide March take is up 150% year over year. It follows the template set when Netflix first claimed the top-grossing US iOS spot in late 2016 on the back of weekly net revenue near $2.9M — proof that a video service can out-earn games and social apps inside the App Store.
The milestone also lands amid a broader willingness-to-pay shift: Sensor Tower's own data show average annual US iPhone app spending rose from $33 in 2015 to $79 last year, and non-game subscription apps would later pull in $18.3B globally in a single year. YouTube topping the chart signals that premium video has become one of the largest single line items in that wallet.
First-order effects
- YouTube Red becomes the company's fastest-growing direct revenue line on iOS, and every one of those in-app subscriptions routes through Apple's store cut — making Apple a quiet beneficiary of YouTube's chart position.
- YouTube now outranks the games and social apps that traditionally dominate grossing rankings, changing which app Apple features at the top of its most lucrative list.
Second-order effects
- Rival video services face pressure to push their own in-app subscription funnels harder rather than steering users to web signup, since the Netflix and YouTube results show iOS users will pay premium video prices directly in-app.
- Sensor Tower's measurement business gains a marquee data point, reinforcing third-party app-intelligence estimates as the de facto scoreboard for subscription revenue that platforms don't disclose.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, app stores consolidate into the default billing rail for consumer video subscriptions — a structural dependency that later shows up in YouTube sustaining the world's top-grossing video app slot and crossing $3B in cumulative iOS consumer spend.
- The subscription-app economy this milestone foreshadows eventually draws copycats like Twitter Blue into the same mobile-first monetization playbook, entrenching recurring in-app purchases as the standard monetization model for media brands.
The trend: Premium video revenue is migrating from advertising into in-app subscriptions, turning Apple's and Google's app stores into the billing infrastructure for streaming services.